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So, what is open data and how can it help cultural heritage organizations?

Today is Open Data Day! As ePSI describes it, the day is a chance for “programmers, data journalists, designers and statisticians from around the world gather to create applications, open up data, create visualizations and publish researches conducted using open public data.” But it’s not just programmers and stats geeks who should be interested. Cultural organizations like museums and archives also have much data to celebrate. More and more often, cultural heritage organizations have made data and content available in digital form to the public without any restrictions.

Open Data in Practice hashtag, photo from the Open Data Institute on Flickr.

Why does it matter to your museum or archive? Joris Pekel, writing on the Europeana Professional blog, suggests a few ways that open data can help cultural organizations. For one, open data can help to fulfill your mission by opening up collections to new audiences: “Institutions that publish their material in an open way have seen it being re-used in a variety of new places such as Wikipedia, educational apps and websites, or innovative new apps by the creative industry. This has resulted in millions more views of their collection.” For another, open data can help your institution to connect and contextualize collections while allowing audiences and creators to create their own mashups of material. Europeana has expanded on the possibilities for open metadata in its report, “The Problem of the Yellow Milk Maid.” Pekel also offers a list of potential tools to make use of cultural data. Putting digital versions of materials on social sites, such as photographs on Flickr Commons, has also allowed for the improvement of information about collections through crowdsourced metadata, which I previously described as the “social life of archives.”

Does the Internet, specifically services like Facebook and Google, narrow or broaden the scope of news and information that you encounter on the Internet? At issue are algorithms that sort and help to select information that you want from the googles of information out there. One of these, that used by Facebook, is called EdgeRank. Underlying all of this is a big question about online social networks, whether online or face-to-face: do your social circles amplify your own views if your friends share information that you are already in the mood to see—i.e., do they create an echo chamber&mdashor do they help you to see new things (and in new ways)?

A new study published by a team at Facebook, led Eytan Bakshy (a colleague and graduate of UMSI), says no. Summarizing the study in slate.com, Farhad Manjoo writes:

Although we’re more likely to share information from our close friends, we still share stuff from our weak ties—and the links from those weak ties are the most novel links on the network. Those links from our weak ties, that is, are most likely to point to information that you would not have shared if you hadn’t seen it on Facebook. The links from your close ties, meanwhile, more likely contain information you would have seen elsewhere if a friend hadn’t posted it. These weak ties “are indispensible” to your network, Bakshy says. “They have access to different websites that you’re not necessarily visiting.”

The Flickr Commons, a crowdsourcing site that allows viewers to contribute tags and descriptions of archival images.

A few months ago, Rose of Anthroarchivist posted about crowdsourcing information in archives. A new report, the second in a series of three, is due out soon from OCLC that discusses “social metadata” in archives, libraries, and museums. Social metadata, explain the report authors in the first part of the report, means “additional information about a resource resulting from user contributions and online activity—such as tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations—that helps people find, understand, or evaluate the content.” Rose discusses the “Children of the Łódź Ghetto Project,” an initiative of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Another interesting project is steve.museum, which invites users to tag and describe museum objects pictured on the site. According to Susan Chun, the project leader, the aim is to create “cyber-volunteers” who establish “enduring relationships” with museum institutions. Initially, many similar crowdsourcing sites for archives and museums aimed to spread out the work of creating detailed descriptive information for their collections (in other words, you might say they were outsourcing metadata generation). The valuable effects of the projects, though, seems to be more in generating excitement and engagement for communities of users interested in a collection’s materials.

The second part of the OCLC report points to this: one of the greatest values of similar projects to archives and museums is their potential to create a sense of energy and community around their collections. Many of the interesting projects were previewed in the session at the Society of American Archivists August 2011 conference, in a panel led by Kate Theimer. To find out a bit more about the myriad projects that engage users and invite user-created content by public users (i.e., archival sites that have Web 2.0 functions) check out some of the projects profiled in the OCLC report. There’s a wealth of information and community to explore!